MySQL collation for all languages

Question

I'm currently developing a website that is going to show stuff for almost any language in the world. And I'm having problems choosing the best collation to define in the MySQL.

Which one is the best to support all characters? Or the most accurate?

Or is just best to convert all characters to unicode?

Answer 1

The accepted answer is wrong (maybe it was right in 2009).

utf8mb4_unicode_ci is the best encoding to use for wide language support.

Reasoning and supporting evidence:

You want to use utf8mb4 rather than utf8 because the latter only supports 3 byte characters, and you want to support 4 byte characters. (ref)

and

You want to use unicode rather than general because the latter never sorted correctly. (ref)

Answer 2

I generally use 8-bit UCS/Unicode transformation format which works perfect for any (well most) languages

utf8_general_ci

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-unicode.html